For the previous 10 years, Uber’s annual Misplaced & Discovered Index has supplied a moderately quirky anthropological snapshot of its riders — and even a couple of insights into society. The annual catalogue of hundreds of thousands of forgotten gadgets ranges from mundane modern-day instruments similar to smartphones and laptops, to extra eyebrow-raising objects like reside fish, an ankle monitor, a toboggan, a bundle of reside butterflies, and a single Louboutin shoe.
This 12 months, Uber is utilizing the report to focus on the identical previous drawback of misplaced gadgets with a brand new twist: robotaxis. 1000’s of things (it’s a bit too new for hundreds of thousands) had been left behind in robotaxis on Uber’s ride-hailing community up to now 12 months, the corporate mentioned Tuesday. There have been the same old suspects of telephones, keys, wallets, passports, and headphones, together with a couple of gadgets that strayed into the who-is-this-rider class: a set of dentures, an “I Coronary heart Sizzling Dads” bag, and a blue hat that reads “Emotional Assist Human.”
Past this entertaining record lies a enterprise alternative, if a minor one. Even in a way forward for robotic taxis, somebody nonetheless has to return the issues passengers go away behind.
Uber has spent the previous a number of years locking up dozens of partnerships with autonomous automobile (AV) expertise corporations. However it actually wasn’t till March 2025, when the “Waymo on Uber” robotaxi service launched in Austin, that the industrial wheels on its AV enterprise began turning. Since then, Uber and Waymo have additionally began a robotaxi service in Atlanta. Uber has added different AV corporations to its app up to now 12 months, together with Motional in Las Vegas and Avride in Dallas, though these nonetheless have human security operators behind the wheel.
That Uber has already logged hundreds of misplaced gadgets in simply 12 months offers some sense of simply what number of robotaxi rides have been accomplished on its app. The underlying message right here is that Uber’s present community is already set as much as reunite riders with their misplaced gadgets, together with a 15-pound yo-yo, one giant black marble duck, a Squishmallow, and a Charli XCX poster.
When an Uber rider forgets belongings in a robotaxi, the method for recovering them is just like another Uber experience: open the app, click on the exercise tab, choose the journey throughout which the merchandise was misplaced, and call buyer help. Riders are then in a position to message, chat, or name a help agent. If the merchandise is positioned, they’ve two choices: pay $15 for an Uber Courier driver to supply same-day native supply, or choose up the belonging in particular person from an AV depot, the place the autos are saved and serviced.
Uber Courier is a rebrand of Uber Join, which launched in 2020 and allowed customers to ship packages and private gadgets between native addresses. However Uber says there’s extra to its robotaxi help community than repurposing present providers.
“With tens of hundreds of thousands of misplaced gadgets reported on Uber every year, we’ve spent the final decade constructing methods that assist riders shortly and seamlessly reunite with their belongings,” Amy Satrom, international head of autonomous help at Uber, mentioned in an announcement. “As autonomous rides proceed to scale on Uber, we’re bringing that very same experience to AVs — combining our fleet operations, help groups, and hybrid community to make getting a misplaced merchandise again easy, even when there’s no driver behind the wheel.”
In February, the corporate introduced Uber Autonomous Options, a brand new enterprise division that conveys its larger ambitions round driverless tech. The division offers corporations with a set of providers that deal with all of the duties related to working a robotaxi, self-driving truck, or sidewalk supply robotic enterprise, together with software program and help providers.
And Uber clearly means to make AVs a serious income driver. The corporate plans to supply robotaxi rides by means of its app in as many as 15 cities globally by the top of the 12 months and has mentioned it intends to be the most important facilitator of AV journeys on this planet by 2029.
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